The end of the summer is probably, simultaneously, the best and worst feeling in the entire world.

I sit around the kitchen table with my family on a lazy Thursday night. We’re spending one of the rare evenings when all of us are home together as an opportunity to play a few of our favorite board games. There’s laughter, there’s mirth, and all of the joys, frustrations, giggles, and high spirits one is prone to expect as we play together.

It’s one of the last few moments where all of us will be together, enjoying each other’s company, before the school year whisks us away to our various schools. The second oldest and I will greet the new September at different universities. The middle child will go off to start his next year of high school. The next will begin middle school, as the youngest enters grade school.

In a little while, we won’t have this––where we’re all together, living and being with one another as a joyful family. Soon, we will all go off in our separate directions. School will start as if there was no pause or break. It would be as if summer had never happened. We will be back in that classroom routine, without that feeling of carefree spontaneity that seems to grasp and take hold of your very being during the haze of lazy summer days.

We will not have this- this comfortable ease of being surrounded by the ones that know us best, by the ones who we grew up with, and learned from first.

But we’ll come back. It’s only a short while until Thanksgiving break, and even shorter after that until Christmas. This parting is not for long. We will come back to each other, we will come back to our family.

Yet, we’ll all be a little different.

We will be changed. We will have gone off and grown as individuals. We will return, eyes shining with new experiences, new trials, new glories, and new hopes and dreams. We will share stories of the most random occurrences, we will share new insights picked up along the way and we will even point out positive differences found in the other. We will be different, but it will be good.

A new school year is the beginning of a new chapter of growth for each and every single one of us. We’ll face changes, overcome obstacles, tackle new things, rejoice in triumphs, and emerge just a little bit bruised- but all for the better. At the start of our next meeting, we’ll all come back just a little bit changed, a little bit different, a little bit more grown up.

The end of the summer is probably, simultaneously, the best and worst feeling in the entire world.

It may signify the end of my stay at home, when I say another goodbye to the ones who know me best.

But it also signifies the start of a new adventure, with new experiences and new opportunities.

I can’t wait to see where the next year takes us.